Published on: Tue Mar 03 2026
First things first: Happy npmx.dev alpha release day!
“What’s npmx” you ask? Well it’s the new, fast and modern npm registry that’s been under intense development for the past month. Go check it out and read the announcement post here. It’s worth your time!
I’ve been contributing to the npmx project as much as my limited free time allows, and a variant of this blog post’s title was asked in the early days of the npmx discord server. It’s a very valid question. As an example, think about having your apps copied by people who are probably relying on a certain TUI powered by the library you maintain to do it. Without being attributed or acknowledged. So yeah, I can see why you’d be bitter about developing open source.
But this is actually not what this post is about. It’s my blog after all, and I’ll allow myself to be just a little bit self-centered. So for me, a father of two working a full-time job, why do I spend time on this?
That’s it.
I care about my craft. I used to spend lots of time playing music, and dreamt like many others of making a career and a life out of it. And, as many others, I realized that it’s remarkably difficult to do so, and that the ones who succeed often find themselves not living the dream they thought they would.
Software development has filled that gap for me, and I feel extremely fortunate to spend 42 hours a week on it, and still be hungry. Open source and projects like npmx are an amazing way to learn and pick up inspiration. And you don’t even need to merge any PRs to do so. Read the source code, follow the discussions, read through people’s PRs or RFCs, ask some questions, hang out. In a world full of agents, community is golden.
We’re in a turbulent time. And instead of simply waiting around for the “inevitable”, which is not as inevitable as we’re made to believe, software developers are actually in a great position to affect the trajectory of things, and build the future we want.
So here are the projects I’m following more closely this year:
npmx - instead of complaining about the state of JS, the npm ecosystem and unhealthy dependency patterns, we can actually improve things. And fast. Throw in talented people from the e18e project and you have a potent force for driving positive change in the ecosystem.
Tangled - atproto-based, decentralised and potentially self-hosted github alternative. Which is a nice thing to have these days. The people are wonderful, the product is cool, and for a node developer, the Nix/Go/htmx tech stack is a refreshing reminder that there’s different ways of doing things.
OpenTUI - now besides a single docs contribution I have yet to contribute much here. But I care about the library powering OpenCode, and that there are great and open alternatives to what the big model providers are building. We shouldn’t leave AI and its tooling to the crypto-bros. Besides, building TUIs with SolidJS is lots of fun.
Hope to meet you out there some day!